Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions

:—Tolstoy, ''War and Peace''}}

This one goes to the top of [[JC]]’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. It was published in 1998, so it’s a bit late to get excited — but while it addresses the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reading, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes, [[JC]], I am. Now, [[get your coat]].”</ref> — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we all ''should'' recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t.

{{br|Seeing Like a State}} takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician governorship can, in specific circumstances, lead to utter disaster. While Scott’s examples are legion one could, and some do, criticise him for his anecdotal approach: he has curated examples that best fit his thesis, and it therefore suffers from [[confirmation bias]]. That may be true, but I don’t think it matters, for Scott’s thesis, when set out, is so ''familiar'', so ''plausible'' and its exhortations so ''consistent'' with other theories in adjacent fields,<ref>{{author|Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} theory; [[Systems Theory]] as expounded by {{author|Donella H Meadows}}, {{author|Thomas Kuhn}}’s {{br|The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}}</ref> that it is hard to be bothered by a lack of empirical rigour. Data is not its value: its [[narrrative]] is its value. Scott is providing a counter-narrative to modern statist (and corporate) orthodoxy, and that in itself is valuable and enlightening.  

Scott’s last two criteria are probably opposite sides of the same coin: an authoritarian state able and willing to coerce society to bring high modernist ideals into being, and a subjugated population lacking the capacity to resist the implementation of high-modernist plans. Scott was writing in 1998, a few years after the collapse of communism and in an era when [[This time it’s different|Francis Fukuyama]] and others were declaring the end of history, all battles won and so forth, so was a little shoe-shuffly about this. He needn’t have been! Not only have we seen the return of authoritarian governments and prostrate populations — for posterity I note I am writing from lockdown that has now lasted some nine months — but it has ''always'' been true of the corporate sector which is resolutely organised to be authoritarian, hierarchical and where you, dear employee, are administrated and ordered like no other participant on Earth. Every “meaningful”<ref>Meaningful to them, not to you.</ref> aspect of your performance and your role is, at some level, reduced to a parameterised data point: ID, location, salary, rank, position, performance, reporting line, holiday entitlement, sick-leave, [[service catalog]], objectives — let me know when you want me to stop. As for the high modernist ideal, well, this entire site is a paean to that, but strategy as we receive it seems entirely predicated on a deterministic, [[reductionist]] ideology that we can solve our landscape and then proceed sedately and without the need to be troubled by turbulent [[subject matter expert]]s thereafter. DB’s John Cryan was incautious enough to suggest we would all be replaced in due course by [[chatbot]]s.  

Speaking of [[chatbot]]s and [[subject matter expert]]s brings us nicely to Scott’s fascinating closing, where he ruminates on the concept, missing from high modernist canon, of ''[[metis]]''. This is hard to describe — folk wisdom, knowhow, Odyssean cunning — but in the corporate world it struck me as most resembling ''[[subject matter expert|expertise]]''. Ingenuity, [[Problem solving|problem-solving]], lateral thinking; what to do if you are in a jam. This is something that the [[high modernist]] programme seeks to do without — the theory being that jams of this sort can be avoided by appropriate planning and one should thus order things so that all things ''are'' planned and [[subject matter expert]]s aren’t needed.